Tag Archives: Environment

It happens every year. What with my commute schedule and personal disposition, I read a lot. This blog and Goodreads are my accounting system for keeping track of the thoughts that arise during all of this. Every year I get stopped by my first really important book that I’ve read since December’s roundup of last year’s titles. Paul Bogard’s The Ground beneath Us is this year’s first such book. Subtitled From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us about Who We Are, this tour of several fascinating locations is a wake-up call. Divided into three sections—Paved and Hallowed, Farmed and Wild, Hell and Sacred—Bogard’s book offers a kind of travelogue with the additional reminder that how we’re treating the land is the most terrifying example of what lack of foresight imaginable (why, Prometheus?) looks like. In a world with a rapidly growing population, we’re paving and building at unprecedented rates. World harvests, experts say, will last only another sixty years. Then we starve.

A dilemma I’ve struggle with here before is the fact that nobody owns this world. Nobody but those driven by money. There’s little that can stop them. This is exemplified by his chapter on fracking in my native Appalachia. Companies protected by loopholes—nooses, actually—devised by Dick Cheney can take over a town and destroy its environment. And this was even before Trump. And this is only but one example. Those who look soberly at where we’re going—and the melting permafrost in the northern hemisphere is about to make the globe nearly uninhabitable for our species—are ignored because they stand in the way of profits. Everybody loses. As a species we have neither the will nor the power to prevent it. Epimetheus reigns.

Not just doom and gloom, The Ground beneath Us is a thoughtful reflection on the human spirit. The titles of the subsections reveal that sacred ground—one of my recurring themes on this blog—is very real. Bogard isn’t a religionist, so you can’t accuse him of special pleading. His moving accounts of visiting sites hallowed by any number of factors, whether violence or simple belonging, reveal what home really means. What a dangerous, maybe even sinful, concept ownership can be. With chapters covering areas as diverse as Mexico City sinking under its own weight, to Ames, Iowa where what we’re doing to the soil is studied, to parts of Alaska accessible only by air, Heaven and Hell are daily and plainly played out before us. This is a very important book. We can only hope enough people will read it before it’s too late.

I’m not proud of it. In fact, truth be told, I tear up a little bit when I think about it. It happened so long ago, but it was a casual act of violence that made me feel big at the time. It wracks me with guilt even today. I killed a bee. For no reason. It was a summer’s day and I was following after my step-father, who’d just taken us for a haircut. Step-dad always wore a crew-cut and disliked hair on boys and men. I’ve always hated haircuts and when I saw a honey bee on a clover flower after leaving the barber shop shorn I stomped on it. I was maybe twelve. That act of senseless violence has never left me.

I’d been stung, you see. Many times, in fact. One incident was particularly dramatic. My mother had driven my brothers and me out to the woods to play with our dog. We made up a game, the way kids will, where my brothers would throw a stick and I’d race our dog to try to fetch it first. I was actually in the lead this time and stepped on a rotting stump to keep my marginal edge. The stump was home to a colony of yellow-jackets and they swarmed out, just like in the cartoons I used to watch. Before I realized what was happening I fell to the ground with multiple stingers burrowing into my bare legs. Our dog was covered with bees and we weren’t sure he’d even survive. At home Mom had me soak in a hot bath because there was a prayer meeting that night at church that we couldn’t miss. I was allowed to take a pillow to sit on over the plain wooden pew.

That incident was in my mind as I stepped on the innocent bee, gathering nectar that summer day. Immediately I regretted what I’d done. Its little body lay twitching in the grass. It had no idea who had killed it or why. My reason for doing so was lame, and long gone. All creatures on this planet are interconnected. We are killing off bees at unprecedented rates. Insect populations the world over are falling at truly alarming speed. We need our bees. We’ve tampered with nature to make it more productive and have ended up with killer bees instead. We’re now warming our globe so they can spread even as we kill off their more docile siblings. That summer sun of memory beats down on me as I consider what I’ve done, and I sincerely repent.